Straphanger

by Taras Grescoe (Times)

This paean to public transportation is front-loaded with statistics edifying to city dwellers and their soapboxes. American households average eleven car trips each day. Nine out of ten American commuters drive to work, three-quarters of them alone. Buying a car, Grescoe writes, “is the beginning of a spiral through selfishness, road rage, and anomie, one whose ultimate goal is the mall and the gated community.” Any overreach in tone, however, dissipates quickly, as the book unfurls into studies of a dozen cities around the world. Grescoe travels on foot (and by public transit) in Bogotá and Moscow. In Los Angeles, he details backroom deals that helped doom the adoption of streetcars there; in New York, he describes a subway prototype, from 1870, constructed inside a huge pneumatic tube. In Paris, he visits an empty, shuttered Métro station that looks like a time capsule either of the urban past or of its future. ♦